July 27, 2025 • 27 mins
Former Naval Academy graduate and nuclear submarine officer Andy Felton's life took an unexpected turn when he faced serious health challenges including anxiety and infertility. Through these trials, he reconnected with his faith and developed a passion for nutrition, discovering a significant gap between theological wisdom and scientific research in Christian health resources.
In this enlightening conversation, Andy shares insights from his book "Nourished by Design: A Christ-Centered Approach to Nutrition." He explores how the Bible's rich theology of food extends far beyond simple dietary rules, revealing how our physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing are interconnected. From the Garden of Eden to Jesus's table fellowship, Andy demonstrates how nutrition is deeply woven into our relationship with God and others. He addresses common misconceptions in Christian health circles while providing practical wisdom for nourishing the whole person according to God's design.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:07):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Dozens more episodes of Bleeding Daylight filled with hope are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:31):
You can help kick the darkness by sharing this and other episodes with friends through your social media and word of mouth.
We know that what we eat affects our bodies and our physical health, but could it also be affecting our mental health and even our spiritual wellbeing?
Today's guest has taken a dive into nourishment for the whole person.
(01:03):
Today I'm in conversation with Andy Felton.
Andy is a former Naval Academy graduate and nuclear submarine officer whose life took an unexpected turn when he faced some serious life challenges.
Through the trials, he reconnected with his faith and developed a passion for nutrition.
After finding a gap between theological wisdom and scientific research, he authored the book Nourished by Design, a Christ-centered approach to nutrition.
(01:33):
Now a father of two with his own healing journey to share, Andrew offers fresh insights on how we can approach nutrition as part of our spiritual walk.
Andy, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thanks Rodney, I appreciate it.
Your book begins by taking us right back to the creation story of Adam and Eve and takes us then through some other early accounts described in the Bible.
(01:55):
Now it might seem strange to some people to start a book about nutrition there, so why do you think that's so essential to take us back to those early stories?
A lot of people actually do take it straight back to Adam and Eve when they talk about nutrition.
That is often reflexively the first place people go.
And why?
Because God placed the first man in a garden full of abundant food, and that's where the story begins with Adam's perfect nourishment.
(02:23):
Now I think some people draw the wrong conclusions from that and try and apply those incorrectly to the Christian diet.
The reason I started in the garden is because it tells us about our anthropology.
It tells us about who we are, who God is, and how we relate to God.
Ultimately God created us to be physical beings with bodies to live out his purposes in the real world in time and space.
(02:50):
This is kind of lost oftentimes on Christians who focus a little bit too much on the so-called spiritual aspects of faith and neglect the bodily physical aspects of our daily existence.
But I wanted to make sure that I quashed that from the beginning and develop a real theology of nutrition that takes our bodily purpose into account.
(03:13):
And I suppose you do end up with two sorts of people at two different camps.
You get those who, as you say, will just look at the spiritual side of things and cultivating good spiritual habits and neglecting the body.
And then there are those again that you've hinted at who will have a look at those early accounts and say, well, this is obviously how we're meant to live.
(03:33):
And they draw parallels to the early diet, which again are not helpful.
So what you've tried to do is to combine them.
So yes, we are spiritual beings, but also we've been given a body to stew it.
Haven't we?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
God created us to be hungry.
The beginning of my introduction follows this arc of redemptive history, including the fall and the Jewish dietary laws, the fact that Esau traded his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup.
(04:03):
Melchizedek in Genesis 14 offers bread and wine and this kind of mysterious offering that foreshadows Christ eventually offering himself as bread.
The Bible is littered with this theme that we're created to be beings that because of our existence in time and space, God brings our spiritual needs into the real world through food.
(04:30):
It's an object lesson in this spiritual reality that we are meant to feed on God and God alone.
I imagine that there are people listening at the moment who heard that this episode is to do with nutrition and godly nutrition at that.
And so all they want is, okay, give us what we're meant to eat, give us what we're not meant to eat and go there.
(04:51):
And I suppose that's part of the problem.
Unless we connect well with God, all those lessons aren't really worth going into, are they?
Exactly.
That's really the reason I wrote the book.
As I was struggling with my own health issues, I struggled with the two things at kind of the same time.
People are struggling with mental illness, right?
(05:11):
Anxiety, depression, all of those types of things and infertility.
I mean, those two things are both skyrocketing, right?
And not as severe as some, but I struggled with both of those things at about the same time.
And so I was devouring secular health advice.
I was reading self-help books, nutrition books.
(05:32):
How can I potentially work with God to promote my own well-being?
But then I was also trying to turn to godly options, Christian health and nutrition options, but I was finding those to be lacking.
And it's precisely for the reason that you described.
They were oftentimes too practical.
They oftentimes drew too simplistic of conclusions.
(05:54):
They drew the wrong conclusions.
They would take either Jesus's diet as a Mediterranean Jew and say that, oh, well, the Mediterranean diet is the best diet and therefore we should just eat fish and olive oil and cheese and stuff.
And that's all great.
The Mediterranean diet is a good diet, but it's not necessarily the conclusion to draw from the Bible.
(06:14):
We shouldn't also look at the garden diet of fruits and vegetables and say that that is the perfect human diet.
There's a lot of nuance to this and you have to develop a careful, thoughtful, theological framework to really understand these issues and put them into context.
And I thought that that was severely missing in anything that called itself a Christian health and nutrition book.
(06:35):
And so that's why I really wanted to write this book and to kind of lay that foundation, but then also not to neglect those practical aspects.
I mean, those are important too.
People need to understand based on this foundation, okay, what is it that I should eat?
How should I eat?
When should I eat?
All of those questions are very important and I don't neglect those.
Going back to the issues that you were facing at the time, certainly with you and your wife facing problems with infertility, that would have exacerbated the problems that you had with anxiety.
(07:06):
So when did it first occur to you that maybe the answer could be found in returning to your faith?
Those struggles can occur for all sorts of reasons.
Looking back, it's very clear that I had kind of a lukewarm faith at the time and God was disciplining me in some way to say, hey, you need to figure out your life here and figure out the source of your nourishment first before you're going to be able to live somewhat independently before you get that life back.
(07:38):
And so that's the kind of the message that I took.
I wanted to make sure that I was not going the typical Western medicine route that sees everything as either luck or genetics and treats it with pharmaceutical drugs and sorts of things that don't really work for people.
And I wanted to make sure that I was doing it the way that I was supposed to be doing it, the way that God intended us to be living.
(08:01):
You've already mentioned that you found it difficult to find books that did walk that balance, that spoke to your faith, but also that spoke to nutrition.
So when you decided to write your book, where did you go to study these things?
Where was the information to draw out on these topics?
Yeah, that's a great question.
(08:22):
And it's partly because I'm not research trained.
I don't have a PhD in any of these topics.
And I'm also a lay person when it comes to theology.
There are a lot of good resources out there in the secular world.
There's no reason to throw out all of secular health and wellness.
It's important to understand what the science is saying and where the science is going.
(08:45):
And there's been a lot of great research in the last couple of decades specifically that have really profound implications on the way that we view nutrition.
It's also important to make sure that you're viewing that through the right lens.
I was really able to pair a lot of these secular resources.
I would go to the science, go to the peer-reviewed published papers.
(09:07):
But then I also wanted to pair that with anything out there that spoke to theology of food, the theology of the body, theologies of health.
Theology of the body, for example, was foundational resource.
Pope John Paul II, although I'm not a Roman Catholic, it does have one of the more authoritative and comprehensive resources when it comes to a theology of the body.
(09:29):
There are several good theologies of food out there.
There are a few theologies of health that I was able to dig through.
Karl Barth has one of them.
Because nutrition really is the intermingling of the body, food, and health, I wanted to make sure that Jesus, who is the redeemed body, he's the bread of life, our perfect food, and the divine physician.
(09:54):
All of these terms are used to describe Jesus in the Bible.
And what a perfect way to illuminate those three important aspects of health.
I wanted to make sure that I paired Jesus as the true compass with science as a helpful vehicle to get to where I was going.
We can just see food as nutrition only.
(10:16):
We can see it as the thing that fuels our body, and we need to take great care to be building our body well with nutrition.
But as you look through scripture, food plays such a central part, doesn't it?
When we see Jesus meeting with people, when he signifies, I'm going to eat with this person or that person, and the religious authorities of the day are talking about, hey, he's eating with sinners, because eating together signifies something.
(10:45):
Is there something in that that you're able to bring out in this book about eating together as a way of developing friendship or growing friendship with others?
That's a great point that comes up again and again in scripture.
And I'd like to rewind a bit.
I'd like to get to Jesus, but I'd like to rewind to the Old Testament.
(11:05):
Because if you look at the proper meaning of the Mosaic dietary law, and I think this is another thing that people get confused all the time, they think that Christians perhaps shouldn't eat pork, maybe because it was outlawed in the Jewish law.
And perhaps the purpose of the Jewish law for that reason was to keep the Jewish people healthy.
(11:27):
I don't think that's the right conclusion to draw.
I think that the actual proper theme that we should draw from the dietary law is this idea of segregation.
And numerous times in Leviticus, when the law is being given, God is talking about separating his people from the pagan nations that surround them.
And the best way to do that is to keep them from eating together.
(11:50):
That really is the main purpose of that law.
And it's a testament to the fact, indirectly, that eating together is like the first step to marrying together and living together and starting to worship pagan gods and idols.
I think that that foundation exists in the Old Testament, this idea of food as fellowship and the table as a communal backdrop.
(12:17):
Jesus just steps in and takes this to the next level in a more positive way.
We talk about Jesus being described as a glutton and a drunkard.
Those terms were not something you want to be called.
The Old Testament described gluttons and drunkards being stoned to death as being like the most abominable people.
That's a detail that we miss today, I think, but it's a really important detail when we look at the Gospel accounts of Jesus.
(12:43):
He was known to dine with Pharisees.
He was known to multiply loaves of bread.
He was known to identify himself as food.
I mean, there's all these things that point to the fact that Jesus fulfilling the law, fulfilling all of those Old Testament shadows of him.
In short, he really fulfilled the sacrificial altar and instituted the communal table in its place.
(13:06):
That was really the central theme of his ministry, especially if you look at Luke, Jesus, he's essentially eating in a meal or he's going to the next meal, the entire book of Luke.
This fact cannot be missed as we look at nutrition and as we just look at Jesus' ministry.
Were there things as you studied, as you looked at food in its place in our society and its place in keeping us healthy, were there things that surprised you?
(13:35):
Yeah.
I think I was a little bit skeptical of the Western model of nutrition, the Western model of health and medicine.
I came into it a little bit with that lens, but I think I became more and more skeptical as time went on.
I think right now, at least in America, we have this Maha moment, the Make America Healthy Again push.
(13:57):
I think this is something that a lot of societies are bringing to the forefront.
Really, the idea is that there's a rebellion against some of this Western model of medicine.
There were some things that I knew beforehand.
People have wrongly demonized fat, for example, for a long time.
I think that's now having its moment, sometimes to an opposite extreme.
(14:19):
But some other things, though, when it dealt with supplements, for example, that I actually learned during my research, for example, things like iron, things that people talk about as fortifying the body.
There's this term that's used to talk about things like iron, a lot of other vitamins and minerals.
They are good.
They're a part of God's plan.
They're a part of our physiology.
(14:40):
But we should really look at how we were intended to receive those things, whether it was supposed to come through food.
For example, vitamin D, I don't really believe that people should be supplementing with vitamin D.
It's not something that's found in food to any great extent, at least to the extent that most supplements have it in.
It's supposed to be synthesized through sunlight, for example.
(15:03):
Those are a few of the things that I had to actually change about my own habits.
You hear contradictory things about both iron and vitamin D, for example, in the popular literature.
But then if you take the theological framework, if you look at Jesus as the logos of creation, what is it that God intended us to do?
How did he intend us to receive these things?
(15:24):
You can start to really understand the science a little bit better and understand which side you're supposed to fall on to be living in accordance with God's plan.
As well as having food to fuel our bodies, to bring us health, there are also ethical considerations to the sorts of food we eat, aren't there?
(15:45):
Yeah, that's a great question.
There are so many theological and ethical dimensions to nourishing ourselves.
I don't cover them all in the book.
Talk about charity, talk about sharing, talk about table manners, being thankful.
I do talk about that quite a bit.
But one of the aspects that I would like to really hit on is this environmental aspect of food.
(16:08):
God calls us to have dominion over the earth, to exercise thoughtful stewardship, and to care for the earth.
As Adam's first activities were to care for and keep the garden, we are also to conserve the natural resources that we have.
So these are theological concepts.
These aren't left or right issues or anything like that.
(16:29):
So in the book, I developed this framework for thinking about environmental stewardship and how that is compatible with our food because there's this idea, for example, that raising meat for consumption and just animal products in general end up having this disastrous environmental impact.
(16:49):
And that's like the kind of going fair in discourse these days.
That is so wrong.
And there is some truth to it in the way that we practice conventional animal raising.
However, if you look at true animal husbandry, if you look at using God's natural cycles, if we embrace the carbon cycle in which animals do emit carbon, but then they put it back in the ground when their feces is intermingling with the microbiome of the earth, right?
(17:19):
And all of these things, not only are they overblown, but it's really the opposite that's true.
That proper animal husbandry, using the proper native grasses, cooperating with God's cyclical environmental cycles.
This is the true way to put carbon back into the land, back into the soil, which is the largest carbon sink that we have.
(17:42):
And to also reap the benefit of having healthy, nutritious food, right?
This is a theme that goes throughout the book.
You can't look at just food production independent of nutrition, and you can't look at nutrition independent of food production.
They have to be both thoughtfully exercised and combined in a single comprehensive framework.
(18:04):
And that's why it's important to look at these issues through the lens of Jesus's guiding logos.
I'm sure that even as you research the book, before you had a chance to finish it, you started to live out some of the things that you had discovered.
How soon did you start to see a turnaround in your own health and with your wife's health?
(18:25):
Oh yeah, that's a good question because I did not exactly have a pristine diet for most of my life.
Although I got by, you know, pretty well.
You wouldn't have known it.
I was a good athlete and appeared to be in good health, but it really is around the edges that these things occur.
You can have metabolic dysfunction and look perfectly fine.
(18:46):
There's actually, in the literature now, there's this diagnosis called thin on the outside, fat on the inside.
This has been used like thousands of times now in peer-reviewed medical science, so it's not just a silly term.
I did have to clean up around the edges, integrating real food.
And I didn't even understand a lot of times the areas where I was eating things that I thought were healthy.
(19:10):
Peanut butter and, you know, all of these things that you buy at the store.
And then you look at the ingredients once you have an educated idea of what's going on.
And you see all the fillers, all the fake oils and highly processed ingredients and sugars and all that stuff that they put in there.
It's just a disaster.
My wife remembers that I was reading some books and then I just went through the pantry and just started throwing things away.
(19:34):
And I had to really overhaul some things and so did my wife.
We kind of embraced this idea of getting rid of anything that wasn't real food.
I do think that there was a pretty big turnaround.
A lot of the stuff is really under the You know, you don't always notice things on the surface level, especially if you're not significantly overweight and stuff like that.
But you start to look at your blood work and you start to see that your triglycerides go down, your HDL goes up, both of those very good things for your metabolic health.
(20:03):
And a variety of other markers that are in the book.
There were noticeable effects.
I think it really has to be one of those things that you just jump into.
You just have to embrace the idea that a lot of the times we're not eating real food and just clean it up.
We know that we are whole beings, so this is something that is not just going to affect the way that we look or the way that we feel physically, but it's going to affect our mental health too, isn't it?
(20:29):
Absolutely.
There's actually a new theory of mental illness in general.
A good doctor over at Harvard, Dr. Chris Palmer, talks about his theory, which is called the brain energy theory of mental illness.
He does a nice job in his book of laying out how metabolic dysfunction in the brain really is the root cause of all mental disease, whether it's schizophrenia or just minor depression or anxiety and stuff like that.
(20:55):
This is also a theme, right?
By establishing the kind of connection, the wholeness of our bodies with our souls and our spirits.
I do try and really emphasize throughout the book that there is this holistic connection that has to play out.
God wants all of us.
He wants our bodies to live out his truth, and he wants also our bodies to house a healthy brain, which has so many impacts too in our spiritual life.
(21:22):
You cannot look at these things separately.
You can't say, oh, I have this kind of separate sphere up here in my head, and that's totally different from my daily physical habits and the way that my health of my body is being played out.
It is important to consider us as unified, whole beings and to treat everything that we do in that light.
We also know that the scripture talks about a number of things that we've almost given away as spiritual disciplines, and yet we see Jesus teaching in the scripture when he says, when you give, this is how to do it, and when you pray, this is how you do it, but he also says, when you fast.
(22:01):
There's almost this expectation that we will carry on the Old Testament practice of fasting.
Does that come into our nutrition as well of times of fasting?
Absolutely.
It's so easy to focus too much on what to eat, what not to eat, where to get it, and then dismiss the idea of when to eat and when not to eat.
(22:22):
I have a whole chapter devoted to this.
It is an assumption that we would fast, like you said.
I think we've seeded this idea.
Although the historical church had a rich fasting calendar for different reasons, both Roman Catholics and Protestants have dismissed this idea in different ways, but right now our fasting calendar or our fasting practices in the church are a remnant of what they used to be.
(22:49):
A lot of people dismiss the idea of fasting for health, as a lot of Christians at least dismiss this idea as being something that is part of this secular biohacking trend.
There's no need for that.
If you look at some of the old aesthetics of some of the saints of the early church, you see fasting as this vibrant discipline that's supposed to nourish the spirit and help foster longevity.
(23:13):
These ideas are not opposed with each other.
I try and really marry those two ideas in the book to return to this ancient discipline that is good for the entire person.
It really helps to reorient both our physical and our spiritual hungers in a way that's something that we need to get back to as a church.
(23:34):
It does sound like this book is going to be helpful for most people to help with health, whether we're suffering any health issues or not.
This is something that is going to be healthy for us, but also spiritually beneficial.
But is there a smaller group of people perhaps that you think this book is going to be of interest to?
(23:54):
Who do you think the audience should be?
Yeah, I really wrote it to be widely approachable for any Christian audience or anyone who maybe has some knowledge of Christianity or who wants to understand more.
I try and make it so that it is both spiritually enriching and that it is helpful and practical when it comes to the scientific insights.
(24:17):
I wanted to make sure that there was no lack of either of those fronts.
So somebody who's struggling with metabolic dysfunction, somebody who doesn't even know what that means, this would be a great book for that person.
It's such a good survey, I think, of just covering so many both theological and scientific points and marrying those together in a way that I think will be really helpful as just a basis, as a lens from which people can approach any other resources that are out there.
(24:46):
Because it's not the in-depth in any one area.
It's not going to be a one, two, three roadmap for correcting your Hashimoto's or some other disease, but it's going to lay the groundwork so that if this is all you had, you would be in really good shape.
So for someone listening who thinks that it sounds like hard work, having to go through my pantry and work out what I can eat, what I can't and everything, I imagine it does take a little getting used to at the start.
(25:18):
But how easy is it to continue following through with this?
Because that's the place you're in now.
Does it just become part of the routine and easy to follow after a little while?
Yeah, I really try and emphasize inclusivity.
The Bible and theological inquiry presents no diet that's exclusive.
(25:38):
You don't have to get rid of food groups to be doing it right.
If that's your idea of healthy eating, then you're doing it wrong.
You should read the book.
I try and present a framework that is something that should cause delight.
I think delight is the key to gratitude and gratitude is one of the keys to thoughtful Christian eating.
(25:59):
If your diet is not causing delight, if cream and butter and meat and bread are excluded from your diet for some reason or some misconception that you have, then you're doing it wrong.
I think that that's liberating because people shouldn't feel as though this is going to be some sort of restrictive exercise.
Food is something that is supposed to represent God's self-offering love for us.
(26:23):
If your food is not doing that, if your diet's not doing that, if it's not causing joy and it's not making you full, then you're doing it wrong.
I reject the idea that there's a ton of discipline involved here.
There is a little bit of discipline in the fact that we have to understand what's food and what's not food.
But other than that, once you reorient both your bodily desires and your spiritual desires to feeding on God and feeding on God's logic and his love as it plays out in this earth, it's not that hard.
(26:53):
If people are interested in getting hold of the book, where is it available?
It's available on Amazon.
The book is called Nourished by Design, A Christ-Centered Approach to Nutrition.
That's going to be the best place to get it.
I will put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find that easily as well.
But I just want to say, Andy, thank you so much for taking the time to research this.
(27:16):
Obviously, it's had benefits for you and your family, but I'm sure it's going to benefit lots of other people.
Thank you for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
Thanks, Rodney.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Dozens more episodes of Bleeding Daylight filled with hope are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:31):
You can help kick the darkness by sharing this and other episodes with friends through your social media and word of mouth.
We know that what we eat affects our bodies and our physical health, but could it also be affecting our mental health and even our spiritual wellbeing?
Today's guest has taken a dive into nourishment for the whole person.
(01:03):
Today I'm in conversation with Andy Felton.
Andy is a former Naval Academy graduate and nuclear submarine officer whose life took an unexpected turn when he faced some serious life challenges.
Through the trials, he reconnected with his faith and developed a passion for nutrition.
After finding a gap between theological wisdom and scientific research, he authored the book Nourished by Design, a Christ-centered approach to nutrition.
(01:33):
Now a father of two with his own healing journey to share, Andrew offers fresh insights on how we can approach nutrition as part of our spiritual walk.
Andy, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thanks Rodney, I appreciate it.
Your book begins by taking us right back to the creation story of Adam and Eve and takes us then through some other early accounts described in the Bible.
(01:55):
Now it might seem strange to some people to start a book about nutrition there, so why do you think that's so essential to take us back to those early stories?
A lot of people actually do take it straight back to Adam and Eve when they talk about nutrition.
That is often reflexively the first place people go.
And why?
Because God placed the first man in a garden full of abundant food, and that's where the story begins with Adam's perfect nourishment.
(02:23):
Now I think some people draw the wrong conclusions from that and try and apply those incorrectly to the Christian diet.
The reason I started in the garden is because it tells us about our anthropology.
It tells us about who we are, who God is, and how we relate to God.
Ultimately God created us to be physical beings with bodies to live out his purposes in the real world in time and space.
(02:50):
This is kind of lost oftentimes on Christians who focus a little bit too much on the so-called spiritual aspects of faith and neglect the bodily physical aspects of our daily existence.
But I wanted to make sure that I quashed that from the beginning and develop a real theology of nutrition that takes our bodily purpose into account.
(03:13):
And I suppose you do end up with two sorts of people at two different camps.
You get those who, as you say, will just look at the spiritual side of things and cultivating good spiritual habits and neglecting the body.
And then there are those again that you've hinted at who will have a look at those early accounts and say, well, this is obviously how we're meant to live.
(03:33):
And they draw parallels to the early diet, which again are not helpful.
So what you've tried to do is to combine them.
So yes, we are spiritual beings, but also we've been given a body to stew it.
Haven't we?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
God created us to be hungry.
The beginning of my introduction follows this arc of redemptive history, including the fall and the Jewish dietary laws, the fact that Esau traded his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup.
(04:03):
Melchizedek in Genesis 14 offers bread and wine and this kind of mysterious offering that foreshadows Christ eventually offering himself as bread.
The Bible is littered with this theme that we're created to be beings that because of our existence in time and space, God brings our spiritual needs into the real world through food.
(04:30):
It's an object lesson in this spiritual reality that we are meant to feed on God and God alone.
I imagine that there are people listening at the moment who heard that this episode is to do with nutrition and godly nutrition at that.
And so all they want is, okay, give us what we're meant to eat, give us what we're not meant to eat and go there.
(04:51):
And I suppose that's part of the problem.
Unless we connect well with God, all those lessons aren't really worth going into, are they?
Exactly.
That's really the reason I wrote the book.
As I was struggling with my own health issues, I struggled with the two things at kind of the same time.
People are struggling with mental illness, right?
(05:11):
Anxiety, depression, all of those types of things and infertility.
I mean, those two things are both skyrocketing, right?
And not as severe as some, but I struggled with both of those things at about the same time.
And so I was devouring secular health advice.
I was reading self-help books, nutrition books.
(05:32):
How can I potentially work with God to promote my own well-being?
But then I was also trying to turn to godly options, Christian health and nutrition options, but I was finding those to be lacking.
And it's precisely for the reason that you described.
They were oftentimes too practical.
They oftentimes drew too simplistic of conclusions.
(05:54):
They drew the wrong conclusions.
They would take either Jesus's diet as a Mediterranean Jew and say that, oh, well, the Mediterranean diet is the best diet and therefore we should just eat fish and olive oil and cheese and stuff.
And that's all great.
The Mediterranean diet is a good diet, but it's not necessarily the conclusion to draw from the Bible.
(06:14):
We shouldn't also look at the garden diet of fruits and vegetables and say that that is the perfect human diet.
There's a lot of nuance to this and you have to develop a careful, thoughtful, theological framework to really understand these issues and put them into context.
And I thought that that was severely missing in anything that called itself a Christian health and nutrition book.
(06:35):
And so that's why I really wanted to write this book and to kind of lay that foundation, but then also not to neglect those practical aspects.
I mean, those are important too.
People need to understand based on this foundation, okay, what is it that I should eat?
How should I eat?
When should I eat?
All of those questions are very important and I don't neglect those.
Going back to the issues that you were facing at the time, certainly with you and your wife facing problems with infertility, that would have exacerbated the problems that you had with anxiety.
(07:06):
So when did it first occur to you that maybe the answer could be found in returning to your faith?
Those struggles can occur for all sorts of reasons.
Looking back, it's very clear that I had kind of a lukewarm faith at the time and God was disciplining me in some way to say, hey, you need to figure out your life here and figure out the source of your nourishment first before you're going to be able to live somewhat independently before you get that life back.
(07:38):
And so that's the kind of the message that I took.
I wanted to make sure that I was not going the typical Western medicine route that sees everything as either luck or genetics and treats it with pharmaceutical drugs and sorts of things that don't really work for people.
And I wanted to make sure that I was doing it the way that I was supposed to be doing it, the way that God intended us to be living.
(08:01):
You've already mentioned that you found it difficult to find books that did walk that balance, that spoke to your faith, but also that spoke to nutrition.
So when you decided to write your book, where did you go to study these things?
Where was the information to draw out on these topics?
Yeah, that's a great question.
(08:22):
And it's partly because I'm not research trained.
I don't have a PhD in any of these topics.
And I'm also a lay person when it comes to theology.
There are a lot of good resources out there in the secular world.
There's no reason to throw out all of secular health and wellness.
It's important to understand what the science is saying and where the science is going.
(08:45):
And there's been a lot of great research in the last couple of decades specifically that have really profound implications on the way that we view nutrition.
It's also important to make sure that you're viewing that through the right lens.
I was really able to pair a lot of these secular resources.
I would go to the science, go to the peer-reviewed published papers.
(09:07):
But then I also wanted to pair that with anything out there that spoke to theology of food, the theology of the body, theologies of health.
Theology of the body, for example, was foundational resource.
Pope John Paul II, although I'm not a Roman Catholic, it does have one of the more authoritative and comprehensive resources when it comes to a theology of the body.
(09:29):
There are several good theologies of food out there.
There are a few theologies of health that I was able to dig through.
Karl Barth has one of them.
Because nutrition really is the intermingling of the body, food, and health, I wanted to make sure that Jesus, who is the redeemed body, he's the bread of life, our perfect food, and the divine physician.
(09:54):
All of these terms are used to describe Jesus in the Bible.
And what a perfect way to illuminate those three important aspects of health.
I wanted to make sure that I paired Jesus as the true compass with science as a helpful vehicle to get to where I was going.
We can just see food as nutrition only.
(10:16):
We can see it as the thing that fuels our body, and we need to take great care to be building our body well with nutrition.
But as you look through scripture, food plays such a central part, doesn't it?
When we see Jesus meeting with people, when he signifies, I'm going to eat with this person or that person, and the religious authorities of the day are talking about, hey, he's eating with sinners, because eating together signifies something.
(10:45):
Is there something in that that you're able to bring out in this book about eating together as a way of developing friendship or growing friendship with others?
That's a great point that comes up again and again in scripture.
And I'd like to rewind a bit.
I'd like to get to Jesus, but I'd like to rewind to the Old Testament.
(11:05):
Because if you look at the proper meaning of the Mosaic dietary law, and I think this is another thing that people get confused all the time, they think that Christians perhaps shouldn't eat pork, maybe because it was outlawed in the Jewish law.
And perhaps the purpose of the Jewish law for that reason was to keep the Jewish people healthy.
(11:27):
I don't think that's the right conclusion to draw.
I think that the actual proper theme that we should draw from the dietary law is this idea of segregation.
And numerous times in Leviticus, when the law is being given, God is talking about separating his people from the pagan nations that surround them.
And the best way to do that is to keep them from eating together.
(11:50):
That really is the main purpose of that law.
And it's a testament to the fact, indirectly, that eating together is like the first step to marrying together and living together and starting to worship pagan gods and idols.
I think that that foundation exists in the Old Testament, this idea of food as fellowship and the table as a communal backdrop.
(12:17):
Jesus just steps in and takes this to the next level in a more positive way.
We talk about Jesus being described as a glutton and a drunkard.
Those terms were not something you want to be called.
The Old Testament described gluttons and drunkards being stoned to death as being like the most abominable people.
That's a detail that we miss today, I think, but it's a really important detail when we look at the Gospel accounts of Jesus.
(12:43):
He was known to dine with Pharisees.
He was known to multiply loaves of bread.
He was known to identify himself as food.
I mean, there's all these things that point to the fact that Jesus fulfilling the law, fulfilling all of those Old Testament shadows of him.
In short, he really fulfilled the sacrificial altar and instituted the communal table in its place.
(13:06):
That was really the central theme of his ministry, especially if you look at Luke, Jesus, he's essentially eating in a meal or he's going to the next meal, the entire book of Luke.
This fact cannot be missed as we look at nutrition and as we just look at Jesus' ministry.
Were there things as you studied, as you looked at food in its place in our society and its place in keeping us healthy, were there things that surprised you?
(13:35):
Yeah.
I think I was a little bit skeptical of the Western model of nutrition, the Western model of health and medicine.
I came into it a little bit with that lens, but I think I became more and more skeptical as time went on.
I think right now, at least in America, we have this Maha moment, the Make America Healthy Again push.
(13:57):
I think this is something that a lot of societies are bringing to the forefront.
Really, the idea is that there's a rebellion against some of this Western model of medicine.
There were some things that I knew beforehand.
People have wrongly demonized fat, for example, for a long time.
I think that's now having its moment, sometimes to an opposite extreme.
(14:19):
But some other things, though, when it dealt with supplements, for example, that I actually learned during my research, for example, things like iron, things that people talk about as fortifying the body.
There's this term that's used to talk about things like iron, a lot of other vitamins and minerals.
They are good.
They're a part of God's plan.
They're a part of our physiology.
(14:40):
But we should really look at how we were intended to receive those things, whether it was supposed to come through food.
For example, vitamin D, I don't really believe that people should be supplementing with vitamin D.
It's not something that's found in food to any great extent, at least to the extent that most supplements have it in.
It's supposed to be synthesized through sunlight, for example.
(15:03):
Those are a few of the things that I had to actually change about my own habits.
You hear contradictory things about both iron and vitamin D, for example, in the popular literature.
But then if you take the theological framework, if you look at Jesus as the logos of creation, what is it that God intended us to do?
How did he intend us to receive these things?
(15:24):
You can start to really understand the science a little bit better and understand which side you're supposed to fall on to be living in accordance with God's plan.
As well as having food to fuel our bodies, to bring us health, there are also ethical considerations to the sorts of food we eat, aren't there?
(15:45):
Yeah, that's a great question.
There are so many theological and ethical dimensions to nourishing ourselves.
I don't cover them all in the book.
Talk about charity, talk about sharing, talk about table manners, being thankful.
I do talk about that quite a bit.
But one of the aspects that I would like to really hit on is this environmental aspect of food.
(16:08):
God calls us to have dominion over the earth, to exercise thoughtful stewardship, and to care for the earth.
As Adam's first activities were to care for and keep the garden, we are also to conserve the natural resources that we have.
So these are theological concepts.
These aren't left or right issues or anything like that.
(16:29):
So in the book, I developed this framework for thinking about environmental stewardship and how that is compatible with our food because there's this idea, for example, that raising meat for consumption and just animal products in general end up having this disastrous environmental impact.
(16:49):
And that's like the kind of going fair in discourse these days.
That is so wrong.
And there is some truth to it in the way that we practice conventional animal raising.
However, if you look at true animal husbandry, if you look at using God's natural cycles, if we embrace the carbon cycle in which animals do emit carbon, but then they put it back in the ground when their feces is intermingling with the microbiome of the earth, right?
(17:19):
And all of these things, not only are they overblown, but it's really the opposite that's true.
That proper animal husbandry, using the proper native grasses, cooperating with God's cyclical environmental cycles.
This is the true way to put carbon back into the land, back into the soil, which is the largest carbon sink that we have.
(17:42):
And to also reap the benefit of having healthy, nutritious food, right?
This is a theme that goes throughout the book.
You can't look at just food production independent of nutrition, and you can't look at nutrition independent of food production.
They have to be both thoughtfully exercised and combined in a single comprehensive framework.
(18:04):
And that's why it's important to look at these issues through the lens of Jesus's guiding logos.
I'm sure that even as you research the book, before you had a chance to finish it, you started to live out some of the things that you had discovered.
How soon did you start to see a turnaround in your own health and with your wife's health?
(18:25):
Oh yeah, that's a good question because I did not exactly have a pristine diet for most of my life.
Although I got by, you know, pretty well.
You wouldn't have known it.
I was a good athlete and appeared to be in good health, but it really is around the edges that these things occur.
You can have metabolic dysfunction and look perfectly fine.
(18:46):
There's actually, in the literature now, there's this diagnosis called thin on the outside, fat on the inside.
This has been used like thousands of times now in peer-reviewed medical science, so it's not just a silly term.
I did have to clean up around the edges, integrating real food.
And I didn't even understand a lot of times the areas where I was eating things that I thought were healthy.
(19:10):
Peanut butter and, you know, all of these things that you buy at the store.
And then you look at the ingredients once you have an educated idea of what's going on.
And you see all the fillers, all the fake oils and highly processed ingredients and sugars and all that stuff that they put in there.
It's just a disaster.
My wife remembers that I was reading some books and then I just went through the pantry and just started throwing things away.
(19:34):
And I had to really overhaul some things and so did my wife.
We kind of embraced this idea of getting rid of anything that wasn't real food.
I do think that there was a pretty big turnaround.
A lot of the stuff is really under the You know, you don't always notice things on the surface level, especially if you're not significantly overweight and stuff like that.
But you start to look at your blood work and you start to see that your triglycerides go down, your HDL goes up, both of those very good things for your metabolic health.
(20:03):
And a variety of other markers that are in the book.
There were noticeable effects.
I think it really has to be one of those things that you just jump into.
You just have to embrace the idea that a lot of the times we're not eating real food and just clean it up.
We know that we are whole beings, so this is something that is not just going to affect the way that we look or the way that we feel physically, but it's going to affect our mental health too, isn't it?
(20:29):
Absolutely.
There's actually a new theory of mental illness in general.
A good doctor over at Harvard, Dr. Chris Palmer, talks about his theory, which is called the brain energy theory of mental illness.
He does a nice job in his book of laying out how metabolic dysfunction in the brain really is the root cause of all mental disease, whether it's schizophrenia or just minor depression or anxiety and stuff like that.
(20:55):
This is also a theme, right?
By establishing the kind of connection, the wholeness of our bodies with our souls and our spirits.
I do try and really emphasize throughout the book that there is this holistic connection that has to play out.
God wants all of us.
He wants our bodies to live out his truth, and he wants also our bodies to house a healthy brain, which has so many impacts too in our spiritual life.
(21:22):
You cannot look at these things separately.
You can't say, oh, I have this kind of separate sphere up here in my head, and that's totally different from my daily physical habits and the way that my health of my body is being played out.
It is important to consider us as unified, whole beings and to treat everything that we do in that light.
We also know that the scripture talks about a number of things that we've almost given away as spiritual disciplines, and yet we see Jesus teaching in the scripture when he says, when you give, this is how to do it, and when you pray, this is how you do it, but he also says, when you fast.
(22:01):
There's almost this expectation that we will carry on the Old Testament practice of fasting.
Does that come into our nutrition as well of times of fasting?
Absolutely.
It's so easy to focus too much on what to eat, what not to eat, where to get it, and then dismiss the idea of when to eat and when not to eat.
(22:22):
I have a whole chapter devoted to this.
It is an assumption that we would fast, like you said.
I think we've seeded this idea.
Although the historical church had a rich fasting calendar for different reasons, both Roman Catholics and Protestants have dismissed this idea in different ways, but right now our fasting calendar or our fasting practices in the church are a remnant of what they used to be.
(22:49):
A lot of people dismiss the idea of fasting for health, as a lot of Christians at least dismiss this idea as being something that is part of this secular biohacking trend.
There's no need for that.
If you look at some of the old aesthetics of some of the saints of the early church, you see fasting as this vibrant discipline that's supposed to nourish the spirit and help foster longevity.
(23:13):
These ideas are not opposed with each other.
I try and really marry those two ideas in the book to return to this ancient discipline that is good for the entire person.
It really helps to reorient both our physical and our spiritual hungers in a way that's something that we need to get back to as a church.
(23:34):
It does sound like this book is going to be helpful for most people to help with health, whether we're suffering any health issues or not.
This is something that is going to be healthy for us, but also spiritually beneficial.
But is there a smaller group of people perhaps that you think this book is going to be of interest to?
(23:54):
Who do you think the audience should be?
Yeah, I really wrote it to be widely approachable for any Christian audience or anyone who maybe has some knowledge of Christianity or who wants to understand more.
I try and make it so that it is both spiritually enriching and that it is helpful and practical when it comes to the scientific insights.
(24:17):
I wanted to make sure that there was no lack of either of those fronts.
So somebody who's struggling with metabolic dysfunction, somebody who doesn't even know what that means, this would be a great book for that person.
It's such a good survey, I think, of just covering so many both theological and scientific points and marrying those together in a way that I think will be really helpful as just a basis, as a lens from which people can approach any other resources that are out there.
(24:46):
Because it's not the in-depth in any one area.
It's not going to be a one, two, three roadmap for correcting your Hashimoto's or some other disease, but it's going to lay the groundwork so that if this is all you had, you would be in really good shape.
So for someone listening who thinks that it sounds like hard work, having to go through my pantry and work out what I can eat, what I can't and everything, I imagine it does take a little getting used to at the start.
(25:18):
But how easy is it to continue following through with this?
Because that's the place you're in now.
Does it just become part of the routine and easy to follow after a little while?
Yeah, I really try and emphasize inclusivity.
The Bible and theological inquiry presents no diet that's exclusive.
(25:38):
You don't have to get rid of food groups to be doing it right.
If that's your idea of healthy eating, then you're doing it wrong.
You should read the book.
I try and present a framework that is something that should cause delight.
I think delight is the key to gratitude and gratitude is one of the keys to thoughtful Christian eating.
(25:59):
If your diet is not causing delight, if cream and butter and meat and bread are excluded from your diet for some reason or some misconception that you have, then you're doing it wrong.
I think that that's liberating because people shouldn't feel as though this is going to be some sort of restrictive exercise.
Food is something that is supposed to represent God's self-offering love for us.
(26:23):
If your food is not doing that, if your diet's not doing that, if it's not causing joy and it's not making you full, then you're doing it wrong.
I reject the idea that there's a ton of discipline involved here.
There is a little bit of discipline in the fact that we have to understand what's food and what's not food.
But other than that, once you reorient both your bodily desires and your spiritual desires to feeding on God and feeding on God's logic and his love as it plays out in this earth, it's not that hard.
(26:53):
If people are interested in getting hold of the book, where is it available?
It's available on Amazon.
The book is called Nourished by Design, A Christ-Centered Approach to Nutrition.
That's going to be the best place to get it.
I will put a link in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find that easily as well.
But I just want to say, Andy, thank you so much for taking the time to research this.
(27:16):
Obviously, it's had benefits for you and your family, but I'm sure it's going to benefit lots of other people.
Thank you for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
Thanks, Rodney.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
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